IRIS: The Ultimate WealthTech Middleware

Wealth management firms are investing heavily in technology to meet client demands and market opportunities. Many firms operate a complex ecosystem for their various lines of business, with an often disparate suite of back-end, mid-end, and front-end applications. This is often synonymous with difficulties in maintaining and evolving the ecosystem as needed. In the age of agility and innovation, such architectures are not a good fit.

Let’s take a look at two solutions that can complement your current technology ecosystem.

WealthTech Middleware Connects Both Ends

A first recommendation to help with such difficult situations is to leverage an appropriate middleware.

Middleware can be defined in many ways, but can be summarized as standardized APIs between complex applications. In the wealth management world, the middleware that is most needed is between the front-end applications and the back-end systems. The former of which can include professional advisor and investor-facing applications, while the latter is typically the system processing the trades, their accounting and the asset servicing.

This is where Univeris IRIS comes in. IRIS defines a capital market API that makes systems portable on both ends of the middleware. The key advantage is that once an app is built using IRIS, it can be deployed to any other environment that complies with the IRIS API—such as plug-and-play. Interface standardization in software comes with the same benefits as the ones the general industry agrees to, such as USB ports, Bluetooth, HTTP, FTP, etc.

Another way to think of IRIS is as an Open Banking API but specialized for wealth management and investments. Wealth management firms can not only use IRIS for existing applications and channels, but also for onboarding FinTech or WealthTech partners, as well as innovations and integrations without the hassle of integration-tribulation that comes with it.

Consider IRIS as the magic “glue” between systems.

A Unified Back-End, A Single Source

A second recommendation is to leverage a unified system for the back-end. A single source for trading, compliance, and asset servicing can drastically simplify operations and consequently, reduce costs significantly. For example, there is no question that embedding pre- and post-trade suitability within a trading platform is much more efficient than layering many systems to coordinate KYP, KYC, approval and supervision workflows.

Furthermore, when a unified back-end is combined with IRIS, it becomes a WealthTech Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

Interested in learning more? Check out our Core System Architecture for the Enterprise infographic to see how Univeris’ product suite achieves front-end Agility and innovation, back-end and compliance precision, and cost optimization. You can also contact us by emailing success@univeris.com.